The Other Minds Festival turns 30! On Thursday–Sunday, October 8–11, 2026, our annual showcase for composers will be held at the Brava Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District.
The Festival opens with Joseph Bohigian’s I Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment, an evening-length multimedia work about the life of the visionary Soviet-Armenian film director Sergei Parajanov (1924–1990) that combines the multilingual songs of the 18th century bard Sayat Nova in Armenian, Azeri, and Georgian with live electronic manipulation of recordings by South Caucasus folk musicians. A collaboration with vocalist and duduk player Khatchadour Khatchadourian, Ensemble Decipher, and artists Tara Baghdassarian and Karo Yagjian, the piece is written for solo voice, duduk, electronics ensemble, and video projection.
On Night 2, the Swiss-born, New York-based Sylvie Courvoisier combines European chamber music and American avant-jazz in a performance for solo piano. Mahsa Vahdat performs original song settings of Persian poetry, accompanied by setar player Atabak Elyasi. Vahdat’s compositions are inspired by her life in exile, her deep belonging to her homeland of Iran, and her dedication to preserving and reviving Iranian music. Night 2 ends with Juri Seo’s Just Intonation Etudes and Wildflowersfollowed by the world premiere of her Bad Decision for string quartet, bass, and drumset, with Friction Quartet.
Night 3 opens with Kristin Norderval and Elizabeth Gaver, who will present a program for voice, live electronics, Hardanger fiddle, and rebec that reflects on historical and contemporary Norwegian-American exchange. The performance draws inspiration from the 200th anniversary of Norwegian immigration to the United States, incorporating historic Hardanger fiddle tunes dating back more than 250 years alongside new composed and improvised material. Zachary James Watkins and John Diaz—known as Foreign/Domestic—present a duo of guitar/electronics and drums. The evening ends with a set of sonic liberation compositions rooted in black sound: King Britt on live electronics and visuals by Alingo Loh.
At the final concert of Other Minds 30 on Sunday afternoon, Charlemagne Palestine, the 79-year-old sovereign of embodied minimalism, graces us with a performance for solo piano that extends his monumental early-1970s work Strumming Music, which he describes as “an approach and technique that is always different and in evolution. It is not a ‘composition’ as such…it is an evolutionary liquid sound continuum process work that I have presented hundredsss [sic] of versions that I have performed over the last 50+ years.” Other Minds is happy to have tracked down Palestine’s preferred piano for his approach—a Bösendofer Model 290 Imperial—that expands the keyboard down a major sixth: the usual 88 keys become 97.